European Union Naval Force
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Military of the European Union |
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| Organisations |
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| Equipment | 546 ships, 2,448 aircraft & 7,490 battle tanks |
| Manpower | |
| Active personnel | 1,825,000 (2016) |
| Expenditures | |
| Budget | $226.73 billion (2016) |
| Percent of GDP | 1.42% (2014) |
The military of the European Union comprises the various cooperative structures that have been established between the armed forces of the member states, both intergovernmentally and within the institutional framework of the union; the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) branch of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP).
The policy area of defence is principally the domain of nation states. The main military alliance in Europe remains the intergovernmental North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), which presently includes 22 EU member states together with four non-EU European countries, Albania, Iceland, Turkey and Norway, as well as the United States and Canada. The development of the CSDP is a contentious issue, in particular with regard to the existing role of NATO. The military form of European integration has however intensified in the beginning of the 21st century, bringing about the deployment of numerous CSDP operations and the establishment of EU battlegroups. The latter have however never been engaged in operations, and other, recent initiatives of military integration, such as the European corps, gendarmerie force and air transport command are intergovernmental and outside the CFSP framework of the union.
Article 42 of the Treaty on European Union provides for substantial military integration within the institutional framework of the union. Complete integration is an option that requires unanimity in the European Council of heads of state or government. For now it remains politically gridlocked considering the critical stance of the United Kingdom in particular. Article 42 does also provide for a permanent structured cooperation between the armed forces of a subset of member states. As of 2015 this option has not been used, despite calls by prominent leaders such as former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, former Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini and former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt for a common defence for the Union. However the debate has intensified by the standoff between the EU and Russia over Ukraine. With new calls for an EU military by EU commission president Jean-Claude Juncker and by other European leaders and policy makers like the head of the German parliament's foreign policy committee Norbert Röttgen, saying an EU army was "a European vision whose time has come". Article 42 was invoked for the first time in November 2015 following the terrorist attacks in Paris, which were described by French President François Hollande as an attack against Europe as a whole.
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Wikipedia